THQ President Wants New Games to Be Cheaper

November 13, 2010 ·
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There’s probably not a single gamer out there who’s been pleased with the incremental price hikes we’ve seen with each subsequent generation of games. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that we were paying $ 50 or $ 40 for brand-new, big-name games. Gamers aren’t the only ones who would like to see new game prices go back to those prices — THQ president Brian Farrell has suggested that a decrease in the price of new games, down from the current $ 59.99 price point, could be very beneficial for game developers and publishers.

“Investors are thinking ‘can we hold the $ 59.99 price point?’ and what we’re thinking about the business is turning it on its head a little bit — it’s not how high a price we can get, but how many users we can get,” he said at BMO Capital Markets’ Digital Entertainment Conference this week (via GamesIndustry.biz). “It’s one of the things we’ve learned from China and Korea. If you can capture everyone under that you can make the most money.”

Farrell doesn’t want to simply give away games for cheaper. He’s still trying to maximize the amount of money his company generates — he is a businessman, after all. But his contention is that by selling games initially for cheaper, it will bring more people in and thusly you’ll have more people willing to spend more money on downloadable content.